ACUTER IMAGER - SUMMER SALE
Sale Price: $100 Cdn or $70 US
Updated: June 7th, 2003
What a wonderful clear night I am having tonight. I'm in such a good mood, I dropped a few prices on eyepeices. First clear nightone in a long time. I had the StellarVue 85L out on the moon, with my Speers-Waler 5-8 at 5mm (yeah, sorry to rub it in, it;s one of the "old" ones),a nd double stacked barlows - an Orion Shorty Plus (3 element) and my 20 year old Dakin 2.4X barlow. My Dakin really needs a good dust cleaning. The image held, although I must admit, I was happier with the image in the 300X range. On an alt-azimuth mount, at 720X, the moon gets a wee bit dim and zips by too fast. :)
Three Moon Images from tonight:
First image was taken on my old astro C90, and a VC Quickcam - parallel port version. The second was taken on the StellarVue 85L, again with the Quickcam VC, and the third one was taken with the Acuter Cmos based imager, again on the StellarVue. These are all single shot images, no processing, no stacking at all whatsoever. Totally raw images. I used to really like my C90 when I bought it - ph about 15 years ago. Now when I stack it next to the StellarVue... *sigh*.....
Two images for you to consider:
The first image was taken around May12th with the SkyWatcher Digital Imager, on my old Astro C90. The old C90 is alomost the same size as an APEX90 or an ETX90.
The first image is raw, but the selection box shows the part I selected for processing. Using the freeware program Registax, I stacked 20 images, subtracted a dark frame, and I did about a minutes worth of processing. I did not adjust gamma, contrast, etc, in short, I did a very small procesing job. Shows you what can be done with the Synta Digital Imager and some freeware programs off the web. Remember too my computer is only a Pentium 500 Celeron, and the telescope used is only 90mm.
One last thought, I have always pointed out that for film astro-photography, you need a very high quality mount. For webcam based imaging, the short duration of the exposures means you can get by with a lot less. For example, you could shoot moon picutres like this using a dobsonian! I was planning on shooting the eclipse last night, but we had nothing but clouds and rain. More iamges as weather permits.